The amount of digital data present in the world is increasing at a very fast rate. The digital revolution that has overtaken our society in the previous 30 years has ensured that matters which would not previously have been the subject of storage and recovery are now routinely stored in a digital fashion. The coming to prominence of digital photography and digital video images has created an even larger source of digital information that is stored.
Much of data storage occurs in relation to the Internet. Billions of websites currently exists. Each website comprises words and images or video clips. The emergence of social and collective websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube, to name but a few, has meant the Internet presentation of immense amounts of photographic and video images, as well has written information.
The Internet is only the tip of an iceberg. Broadcasting organisations and government archives (including museums) all possess an immense amount of digital assets. In the case of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) alone, hundreds if not thousands of terabytes of old and historical audio and video material require constant archival maintenance and protection against loss or damage. Google® (trademark) and Yahoo® (trademark), to name but two from many dozens of current search engines searching the entire Internet, maintain resumes and address maps each for at least some billions of websites so that Internet users can employ a search engine to search keywords to find one or more websites on a particular subject.
Quite apart from civilian use, government organisations in all countries keep and maintain records of all manner of material ranging from medical information, police information, security service information to military information. Although we may never get to know the extent of data are so stored and maintained, it is to be assumed to include many hundreds (if not thousands) of terabytes.
With the currently available technology, nearly all storage is on rotating disk drives that require large amounts of power to be provided in server farms that provide Internet access to material. A typical server farm can require between 10 and 100 MW of power. This means that a great deal of extra energy is used in cooling and ventilating server farms. Projections of world energy usage predict a significant proportion of power production to be used in connection with server farms.
In the past large amounts of stored digital data, such as historic websites and historic search engine content, have been discarded simply because the amount of storage available was not enough and nor was it fast enough. These server farms have come, only very recently, to preserve even more data. The use of so-called “cloud” services now involves individual archive material from individual computing machines being stored not within the individual machine itself (at least as an archive) but within a server disk in a machine in a server farm. This threatens to increase even more the amount of digital assets that require maintenance and security.
Threats to archived digital data come in many forms. Disk drives are prone to irreversible crashes. Cyber-attacks can be used to destroy or alter data. Power failure can disable access ability. Military attacks ranging from explosive destruction to magnetic pulse emission can destroy data stores.
It is an object of the present invention to enable long term secure digital data asset storage with minimised energy requirements. It is a further object of this invention to prevent the necessity for discarding of data for lack of storage capacity and to allow the data most likely to be accessed to be copied automatically to a storage facility where performance can be optimised using finite local resources.
It is a further object of this invention that the user experience of accessing their information should be independent of the physical locations in which the data is stored, and the locational dependencies should be totally transparent to the user, except for latency and transfer speed issues.
It is a further object of this invention to ensure that the user can determine criteria for selecting locations in which their data will be stored, and that those wishes should be enforced.
It is a further object of this invention that the network of data storage locations should respond to environmental conditions, and that data should be migrated automatically, or semi-automatically, to alternate locations in order to preserve the integrity of the data storage in accordance with the user's wishes.
It is a further object of this invention to allow the user to assign ownership of the stored data to another user, either on demand or according to a time schedule or in response to external events.